Digital Equipment Corp still takes it very seriously indeed, and just about everybody in the PowerPC world supports it, but it is looking increasingly irrelevant that there are versions of Windows NT for processor architectures other than iAPX-86, and NEC Corp has now thrown in the towel according to Unigram.X. In the US, NEC has stopped manufacturing and selling workstations and servers built around the MIPS Technologies Inc-designed RISCs it fabricates, and is concentrating solely on iAPX-86 -based systems for its NT machines. It will continue to sell R-series machines running Unix, and it will still sell NT on the RISC in Japan, where they will also be manufactured. Most were previously made in the US. The company announced the Pentium Pro SH so-called fault-resistant servers last week. Gartner Group Inc’s Dataquest arm, which got hold of an internal NEC memo saying that MIPS was no more for NT, speculated that the decision was almost certainly instigated by the merger of operations with Packard Bell Electronics Inc. But NEC is having none of this, saying that it decided on the close-out long before Packard Bell came on the scene, which seems to make more sense.
